[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. On this Republican Convention Week, it's thing number four, 100 years of Republican convention speeches. We're going to have a particular take on this that I'll explain in a second. Just to look back, on Monday, we did 100 years of the American right and we played clips of some of the presidential nominees in the early part of the last 100 years. Calvin Coolidge in 1924, Herbert Hoover in 1932, Wendell Willkie in 1940. You can go back and listen to Monday's segment on our website if you like and if you missed it.

For today's segment, we'll focus on Republican convention speeches from the 1960s through recent times. We're going to do this mostly with this take, convention speeches in years the Republican candidate for president lost but that set up a future victory for the next time around. We'll open by overlapping with Monday show with one soundbite in common. We played this on Monday. We're going to play it again. The most famous line uttered by the 1964 Republican candidate, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson that year. Here's the line with some extended applause in the middle of it removed for time.

Senator Barry Goldwater: I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

[applause]

Brian Lehrer: Barry Goldwater in 1964. With us now for this episode of 100 Years of 100 Things is presidential historian Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton, CNN political analyst, NPR contributor, and author of books including his forthcoming Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue. He has also written a biography of Jimmy Carter, who, like WNYC, was also born in 1924. Professor Zelizer, always good of you to come on the show and thanks for doing this with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Julian Zelizer: Thank you. It's great to be back with you.

Brian Lehrer: Goldwater endorsed extremism in that clip from 1964. What kind of extremism was he referring to?

Julian Zelizer: Public policy extremism and an ideological extremism, meaning he thought the Republican Party under people, like his primary opponent, Nelson Rockefeller, were too moderate. They basically accepted the new deal. They accepted the policies that Democrats had pushed. He wanted to be much more aggressive with an anti-government philosophy. He voted against the Civil Rights Act of '64. He was critical of social security, talking about privatization. He really wanted to have an extremism, which in his mind meant a total embrace of what conservatism really was about.

Brian Lehrer: Why did Goldwater lose so badly in '64? Was it anything about him or anything in the Republican campaign or convention of 1964 that helped to set up Richard Nixon's victory just four years later?

Julian Zelizer: Well, some of it was him. He was not a good campaigner. He said what was on his mind and Johnson's team was very good at taking clips of his statements, including when he talked about using tactical nuclear weapons and using them against them. Part of it, he was off center and he was not where much of the country was in the early 1960s, and so he was going against core policies that many Americans embraced.

The party finally was also divided and they didn't unite around him and you had many northeastern liberals who didn't think what he was doing was right. Once he lost, and he lost terribly, they said, "We have to move in a more moderate direction and not embrace the extremism that he wanted."

Brian Lehrer: It's not how we think of Richard Nixon, who won in '68 generally, as moving away from extremes.

Julian Zelizer: No. It's true, but he was trying to build the coalition. His argument in '68 about a silent majority was meant to bring in everyone but the student protestors and the anti-war activists and to create a governing coalition that was broad. In '68, Nixon was actually very vague when talking about issues connected to the great society and domestic policy so that he couldn't really be turned into another Barry Goldwater.

Brian Lehrer: Next clip. Again, in a year the Republicans lost pretty big in, but they would win in the next cycle, 1976. This is just after Watergate. Gerald Ford, Nixon's vice president who took over when Nixon resigned, is the nominee. He would lose to Jimmy Carter. Perhaps the star of the show at the 1976 convention was the Republican who lost to Ford in the primaries but would, of course, win it all four years later, Ronald Reagan. In this clip, which is perfect for a centennial series, he's imagining a time capsule about 1976 being opened by people 100 years in the future.

Ronald Reagan: Will they look back with appreciation and say, "Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept us now 100 years later free, who kept our world from nuclear destruction." If we failed, they probably won't get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom and they won't be allowed to talk of that or read of it. This is our challenge and this is why here in this hall tonight, better than we've ever done before, we've got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we've ever been, but we carry the message they're waiting for.

Brian Lehrer: Ronald Reagan at the 1976 Republican Convention. Professor Zelizer, a few things to talk about there. He referred to there being fewer than we've ever been. Did he mean the Republican Party was so down and out because they had gotten blown out in the 1974 post-Watergate midterms?

Julian Zelizer: Yes. After Watergate, Republicans were feeling incredibly despondent. The '74 midterms went well for Democrats. In '72, Nixon wins by a huge landslide and Republicans think they're on their way to a new coalition, but their numbers are falling. They're scrambling for new leaders and they're scrambling for new issues. That's what he is referring to. Reagan almost wins the primaries against President Gerald Ford. The issue that he really gravitates to as the primaries unfold is national security and the Cold War with the Soviet Union. He rejects the policy of détente, which is what both Richard Nixon and then Gerald Ford pursued easing relations with the Soviet Union.

He said, "We have to stand firm against communism or freedom will end." That is the setup for that piece. He's calling for a revitalization not only of military policy but then, connected to that, of the Republican party around a conservative foreign policy vision in the aftermath of Vietnam.

Brian Lehrer: The Reagan use of the word freedom. Both Democrats and Republicans use the word a lot, but they tend, I think, to refer to different things or at least inspire different feelings. Want to reflect on the word freedom and how Reagan used it there or in general?

Julian Zelizer: Yes. Sure. Look, if you go back to the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt used that for a very different vision. It was really freedom from fear from domestic economic collapse and the uncertainties of the market. Many civil rights activists used freedom to talk about social rights and freedom from racially oppressive structures. Reagan connected that vision of freedom to foreign policy and ultimately to the Cold War. What would ensure freedom according to Reagan was repelling the Soviet Union and maybe not just containing them, which had been the policy since the 1940s, but ultimately destroying the threat. That was how he defined freedom.

Domestically he connected freedom to the free market. To be free was to be free from government here in the United States as opposed to the '30s where freedom would come through government assistance.

Brian Lehrer: We've certainly seen in these examples so far how quickly things can change in American politics. The Republicans got blown out in '64, the year that Lyndon Johnson was reelected in a landslide or elected in a landslide after inheriting the presidency from Kennedy. Nixon won then four years later in '68. Nixon won in a landslide of his own in '72, but then the Republican Congress lost in a landslide just two years later in the midterms of '74. By 1980, Reagan wins and in 1984, he wins in a landslide of his own. I think he even carried New York that year if I remember correctly the history. I think the last time a Republican carried New York, correct me if I'm wrong, but we see these wild swings at least in that era.

Julian Zelizer: Absolutely. Reagan is a way to tell that story because, in 1980, he is saying many of the same things that Goldwater was saying in 1964. Some say that Reagan did it with more charisma and with more optimism, but really the political tenor of the country had shifted. What Reagan was saying sounded much more mainstream. The conservative movement in the '70s had really worked at the grassroots level and in the world of ideas to legitimate some of these concepts. Here in 1980, Reagan demonstrates how far the Republican party and more importantly how far conservatism had come.

Yes, Reagan will cut into many Democratic areas, not just the South where Democrats had always dominated, but even in the Northeast in places like New York, and in '84, the convention features many people like Jeane Kirkpatrick who are Democrats who are saying we're now with Reagan, and that is the essence of building a new coalition.

Brian Lehrer: These days it seems like, as some pundits have said, all of politics, at least presidential politics is played between the 40-yard lines. We're not close to that blowout in any of the recent elections. In the Bill Clinton years, which we're going to get to, he won fairly comfortably but nothing like these examples on either side of the aisle that we've been talking about so far and not since 2000.

Julian Zelizer: No. That's absolutely right. '84 is really the last major landslide election we've had, and we've moved into an era, whereas we have discussed many times the electorate has calcified, and increasingly so, and so candidates aren't really looking to win over huge swaths of new voters in new states. They've basically abandoned that although in this election, it seems like there is an effort to do that. Basically, yes, you're playing for a few states and within those states, increasingly a narrow or narrower portion of the electorate. It's a very different kind of strategic politics, and it makes the grand coalitions of LBJ, of Reagan much harder to achieve.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're in our WNYC Centennial series on the Brian Lehrer show 100 Years of 100 Things. We're doing two of these a week, all kinds of things. Next week we're going to go on to 100 years of global temperatures and 100 years of air conditioning. This week being Republican Convention Week, we did 100 years of the American Right on Monday. We're doing 100 years of notable convention speeches, Republican convention speeches today with a theme of years that the Republicans lost the presidency, but would go on to win in the next cycle or so.

Listeners, anyone want to contribute an oral history? Is there anyone listening now who has ever attended a Republican convention, you're invited to call in with some oral history, anything at all that was a memorable moment or a big idea to you from a Republican convention or Republican convention speech. 212-433-WNYC for Princeton historian Julian Zelizer, 212-433-9692, or any Republican or anyone else want to reflect on losing Republican candidates for president and how those losses help set up future victories. 212-433-9692, call or text.

Next example of a losing year Republican convention speech and how it would help lead to a victory in the future, in this case, not the next election cycle, but maybe helping set the stage for Donald Trump's election 24 years in advance. This is the right-wing culture warrior of his day in 1992, presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan in what's probably his most famous public moment and one of the most famous ever at a Republican convention. For many of you, if you've never heard this before, a trigger warning might be useful, but here we go.

Pat Buchanan: Like many of you, last month I watched that giant masquerade ball up at Madison Square Garden where 20,000 liberals and radicals came dressed up as moderates and centrists in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history. Militant leader of the homosexual rights movement could rise at that same convention and say Bill Clinton and Al Gore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history and so they do.

There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself for this war is for the soul of America. In that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton and Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.

Brian Lehrer: That's a mashup of some of the things, a montage, and that was produced by a group-- I'm going to look up the name of it so we can give them credit, but that was a montage of things that Pat Buchanan said in that 1992 Republican convention speech. Professor Zelizer, can you remind us of the context of that convention moment?

Julian Zelizer: Yes. It's quite a speech. Molly Ivins, the humerus wrote, "It probably sounded better in the original German," and Buchanan had taken on President George H. W. Bush, Republican, and Bush was the epitome of the establishment. He had angered many Republicans in 1990 by agreeing to raise taxes to cut the deficit. He supported a lot of domestic policies. Buchanan, who was a very controversial figure, had been a speechwriter, Republican speechwriter, including for Nixon, had been accused of trafficking and anti-semitic ideas and really engaging with the far right.

He attacked Bush in the primaries as King George called them an elitist and part of an old Republican party, and this speech is worth looking at. The whole thing is quite the text. It's blistering, it's really going after many ideas, which then were already normalized in mainstream America and today certainly are. He's setting up what he believes should be a centerpiece of Republican politics. That is the culture wars going after everything that in his mind came out of the 1960s and was undermining American values. At the time, it was seen as pretty extremist speech as the joke suggested.

Even many Republicans, including George H. W. Bush, were not comfortable with this but it's one of those speeches now people look back and say, wow, that wasn't so much of an aberration. He was actually hitting on many ideas that a lot of Republicans were gravitating to and would ultimately define a lot of Republican politics.

Brian Lehrer: That montage was made by the Educational Video Group. Oddly, it sounds that once very retrograde from 32 years ago, but also more contemporary than many other Republican convention speech clips that came between 1992 and 2016, no?

Julian Zelizer: I think that's exactly right. We have heard some of these themes. Obviously, they're variations, they're revised to current times, but they're hitting on the same issues that education has gone awry and is teaching kids the wrong values, that sexual norms are moving in a dangerous direction, that feminism is somehow a threat to the country. It's very similar to a lot of what we often will be hearing this week. It's a speech a little different than 1964 and how Buchanan imagines Republican conservatism, but it's also something at the time was seen as far out there, but over time becomes very normal within one of the parties.

Brian Lehrer: We've invited some oral history calls, and I think James in Manhattan has one that goes way, way back relative to today. James, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

James: Thank you, Brian. Your work is beyond praise, but to be quick by childhood, baptism in politics was the convention of '52, probably the first one to get really wide TV coverage. The Republican Convention opened still as an open convention because Senator Taft, who was known as Mr. Republican, was in contest with General Eisenhower. As I recall, I think it went two or three ballots, and finally, Eisenhower got the nomination and went on to defeat Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate. To some extent, Eisenhower represented the Cold War era. He was more hardline than Stevenson, but I don't think it was quite as virulent as it is today.

Brian Lehrer: What made you, if you were at that time, you're talking about being 10 years old in 1952, or your family, if that was the context, Republican at that time?

James: I wasn't Republican. In fact, my family, we were working-class Bronx Democrats with a portrait of FDR in the living room. I think it was really the first big convention to be on early, early television. Prior to that, I only remember the famous Key Fowler Commission was televised, and then this '52 Convention happened. It was quite a big event because you could see it on TV, and it was very lively.

Brian Lehrer: James, thank you for your call. Really appreciate it. We really haven't talked about Eisenhower in this centennial retrospective. What would you say, if anything, Professor Zelizer, about that convention?

Julian Zelizer: That's a really interesting convention, and it's similar tensions playing out in terms of trying to define what the party is going to be with Senator Taft really being the main conservative voice, a very prominent Republican at the time. The battle is over, in many ways, foreign policy. Taft represents an older Republican vision that wanted to really limit US involvement overseas, that was not comfortable with the post-World War II expansion of the Cold War.

Eisenhower, who had been nonpartisan, had not really been tied to either party, had been a military hero. Here he is, as a Republican candidate, really embracing the idea that the United States had to be deeply engaged overseas in international alliances and new institutions that were forming, such as NATO, and to have a robust response to the Cold War. Because it is on television, which is new, most homes didn't have television yet, so they're also seeing this and watching it in a different way.

Eisenhower's triumph in the end of this contested and pretty heated convention is very important in defining the GOP in terms of foreign policy. It's a triumph of internationalism within Republican politics that would last many decades. It's a fading moment for a while for what Taft thought should be a much more restrained approach by the United States overseas. I'll add, over his presidency, Eisenhower will also come to accept most of the New Deal programs, pragmatically at a minimum, say there's no real reason for Republicans to go after programs like Social Security because they're going to lose.

Brian Lehrer: More oral history. Barbara in Brooklyn. You're on WNYC. Hi, Barbara.

Barbara: Hi. A longtime listener and love the show. In 1980, I was a junior at University of Michigan, and it was my first presidential election that I'd be voting in. Of course, we were putting posters up, Bedtime for Bonzo all over Michigan, and really just appalled that we were having an actor as a potential.

Brian Lehrer: Bedtime for Bonzo, for people who don't know, was a movie that Ronald Reagan was in, a silly movie, and so derogatorily, you were associating him with that. Go ahead.

Barbara: Exactly. My boyfriend at the time was a journalistic photographer, and he had a press pass to go to the Republican Convention in Detroit, so I joined him. I was in the audience. He was up backstage. I was so against Reagan at the time. Of course, in the audience, there were an incredible amount of people who were placed up front to cheer him on. When he came on stage, I was so enamored by him. I was in my own shock. I was just surprised that the charisma was so palpable, and he was so likable. It really made me-- I just realized this guy is going to be president. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: Barbara, thank you. Thank you for that story. Probably a lot of people, even who didn't think they liked Reagan, and even if they didn't wind up voting for Reagan, like it sounds like Barbara probably didn't, had that kind of response to him personally, right? Professor?

Julian Zelizer: Yes. I think that's actually a great oral history. A lot of people detested Reagan. Now we have this nostalgia of someone who did create unanimity in the country, who was this figure like FDR that everyone gravitated to, but he was incredibly polarizing. The ideas he was putting forth in 1980, even though the country was in really difficult economic shape and having many big foreign policy problems like the Iran hostage crisis, for many Democrats, the idea that he would be president of the United States, either because he was an actor, some people didn't take him seriously.

Others who did thought, "How could the country have a president whose entire agenda was so antithetical to the government programs and civil rights initiatives that had defined this country for decades?" He won some over with his charm, and they watched him, and he was made for the era of television that started in the early '50s. Part of it, again, was there was more room by 1980 for these ideas than there had been in '64. For many Democrats, it's a really difficult election, as is '84, when it legitimates the Reagan presidency by doubling down with a huge landslide victory.

Brian Lehrer: Next clip, next election cycle, 1996. This is as Bill Clinton is running for re-election and will win, and a serious gender gap has broken out between the parties by then. The Republicans choose as their 1996 convention keynote speaker a young woman member of Congress from Staten Island, Susan Molinari. This is a very short clip, but you'll get the point.

Susan Molinari: I have some really good news for you. This speech is a lot like a Bill Clinton promise. It won't last long, and it'll sound like a Republican talking.

Brian Lehrer: In that little soundbite, many implications. First of all, how about that characterization of Bill Clinton? Talks like a Republican.

Julian Zelizer: Yes. This is in '96. It's two years after Republicans under Newt Gingrich had taken over the House and the Senate, and Clinton had tried to undercut that by moving to the center on many key issues and giving a famous State of the Union address where he says the era of big government is over. He's recovered by '96, and he's doing very well. Robert Dole is seen as an older candidate, not very exciting. There's something about Clinton that the country really, really likes.

This is not one of the famous keynote speeches, but she is trying to say, A, he's not someone who's trustworthy, which is a constant attack on Clinton, and B, don't believe that he's moving to the center. It's not real. It's not going to be lasting. It was a message ultimately that didn't really work as Clinton is reelected and goes on to serve his second term and ends, despite being impeached, as a very popular president.

Brian Lehrer: It's also, "Look at me. I'm young. I'm female. I'm an example of a Republican," right?

Julian Zelizer: It is, and it's also an example that sometimes these keynote speeches or big convention speeches, in general, have people who are seen to be exciting voices of a new vision of the party. Certainly, Republicans were struggling then with the gender gap and the perception that the GOP was really a party of older male white voters. In the end, that has continued. Both her own career didn't go in the direction I think she hoped, but also what she is arguing about where the Republican Party was moving didn't turn out to be where the Republican Party was moving.

Brian Lehrer: Again in that case, along the lines of the theme of this history crawl, the Republicans would win the next time around in 2000 with George W. Bush. Any relationship to the coalition they were trying to build with Susan Molinari as keynote speaker in '96?

Julian Zelizer: To some extent. Look, Karl Rove was the person who ran George W. Bush's campaign. Rove did imagine trying to recreate what Nixon had achieved in '72 to bring in a new Republican Party that was softer, more compassionate, he would say, than what Reaganism had been about, tried to deal with issues such as education, much more liberal at the time on immigration than where some Republicans wanted the party to go. It didn't really cut in, though, into what Molinari was arguing. It didn't become a very diverse party.

These conventions they'd often show pictures of the female delegates, or the non-white delegates, but they were far and few between. The Democrats were really the party that embraced the character that Molinari was talking about, not the GOP. I think it was more an issue-based coalition where Bush was trying to broaden the reach of Republicanism.

Brian Lehrer: One final clip of a losing candidate, but who may have set the stage in defeat in a different way, I think, than we've highlighted so far for an eventual Republican victory. We go to 2008 when John McCain was running against Barack Obama and had chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate.

John McCain: I'm not in the habit of breaking my promises to my country, and neither is Governor Palin. When we tell you we're going to change Washington and stop leaving our country's problems for some unluckier generation to fix, you can count on it.

[applause]

John McCain: We've got a record of doing just that and the strength, experience, judgment, and backbone to keep our word to you.

[applause]

Brian Lehrer: John McCain in his losing candidacy in 2008. The way oddly enough I think that the McCain candidacy and then the Mitt Romney candidacy in 2012, the two who both lost to Barack Obama set up the next Republican victory, Donald Trump in 2016, was that the GOP base never got excited enough about either of them, and Trump figured that out, would you say?

Julian Zelizer: Yes, and the one thing of 2008 is that Sarah Palin part of it. The vice presidential pick which McCain had selected her in part because he saw her as the new energy, and a new face in the party, an exciting voice. She was much more comfortable with a more radical vision of conservatism and had rallies where people would have all sorts of signs about Barack Obama, and make all sorts of insinuations about him that McCain himself was not really comfortable.

There's a famous moment at a town hall where someone is really questioning just the character of Obama, and he pulls the mic away from her and basically pushes back against his own supporter. He doesn't represent where the party is going but Palin does. I think this is the time Trump already has some aspirations about politics, I think he's watching. Palin uses many arguments, puts them forward that are familiar today, including her incessant attacks on what she called the lamestream media. Arguing the media was rigged, it was elitist, it was liberal.

Some of the themes there not from the keynote speech and not from McCain, but from the Vice presidential pick would resonate. If you combine them with Pat Buchanan in 1992 and a little bit of Goldwater in '64, you get the mix that I think helps explain the foundation of Trump and Trumpism in 2024.

Brian Lehrer: McCain had come to say eventually that he regretted picking Sarah Palin as his running mate because of some of the things she represented, but her-- let's say what she stood for only grew as what he stood for faded. That's our WNYC Centennial Series 100 Years of 100 Things for this week. Next week, things five and six, 100 Years of Global Temperature Change and 100 Years of Air Conditioning. For today, we thank Julian Zelizer, Princeton history professor, CNN and NPR contributor, and author of the forthcoming book Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue. Hope you'll come back when the book comes out.

Julian Zelizer: Of course. Thanks for having me.

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